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Consumerism is Changing the Internet / The Internet is Changing Consumerism

Nearly every slide of the latest edition of Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report catalogs new customer behaviors and big changes in how audiences are engaged and connected to on the Internet. Here are three key takeaways that stood out to me from an Internet Performance perspective.

1) Twitter is the Go-To for Breaking News

Meeker states that the average person spends close to 6 hours a day on the Internet, while nearly 90 percent of millennials say, “my smartphone never leaves my side.” So, it’s no surprise that Meeker’s Internet Trends report also notes the growing choice for getting timely news is crowd-sourced, 140-character telegraphic bursts delivered over the Internet through Dyn customer Twitter.

Becoming a “news central” probably wasn’t an outcome Twitter anticipated when the company started in 2006. But Twitter did know from the beginning of its relationship with Dyn that they needed to maximize their Internet Performance and the availability, security, and speed of their traffic in a dynamically changing Internet environment was going to be a major factor in their success.

2) Video is Big. User-Generated Video is Ginormous

Video now accounts for 64 percent of Internet traffic. Facebook has over four billion video views per day. Meeker reports that’s up 4x in just the past six months. Video game viewing on Twitch, recently purchased by Amazon, has 100 million monthly active users, up 122 percent in the past 12 months.

To a great extent, the video being consumed is user-generated content – one of the most interesting trends noted in Meeker’s 197-slide report. User-generated video is the engine powering Dyn customer Keek, a leading mobile video social network with over 12 billion page views and 2+ billion video views, and mobile visitors spending an average 8 minutes on the site.

With that type of traffic, Keek needed to implement an Internet Performance approach that would live up to customers’ expectations of speed and availability so a high-volume site efficiently and not have bottlenecks at critical moments… which is why Keek came to Dyn to talk about Internet Performance.

3) It’s a Just-in-Time World and You Better Deliver the Goods On-Demand

Meeker devotes a section in her report on “Getting What You Want…When You Want It”, noting that the confluence of mobile and the web has led to new consumer behaviors where on-demand transportation is expected to appear within minutes; food is expected to be delivered in a quarter-hour or less; and entertainment is expected to always be there.

But if you don’t get it, do you blame the Internet? Probably not. You blame the site you were trying to reach, or blame the app that can’t pull down what you want.

Most businesses don’t realize that from a customer perspective, they are the Internet and had better do everything in their power to make sure the customer’s online experience is a consistent one every time.

For example, take a look at Dyn customer Zappos. They know the critical role of Internet performance. They have deployed an Internet Performance approach to make Zappos.com’s customer experience easy and hassle-free and have spent an impressive amount of energy to continuously learn what customers want and deliver exactly that – enormous selection and convenience in an easy-to-use online package.

Final Thoughts on Winning Big

Meeker concludes the 2015 Internet Trends report with this thought, “… the one rule is that very few companies will win – those that do – can win big.”

Not all will win, but I’d lay odds that like the three Dyn customers I’ve cited, those that that do win will have taken an Internet Performance approach to set themselves apart to give them a competitive edge. And they’ll not only have won… they’ll have won big.